2 research outputs found
Testing Microfluidic Fully Programmable Valve Arrays (FPVAs)
Fully Programmable Valve Array (FPVA) has emerged as a new architecture for
the next-generation flow-based microfluidic biochips. This 2D-array consists of
regularly-arranged valves, which can be dynamically configured by users to
realize microfluidic devices of different shapes and sizes as well as
interconnections. Additionally, the regularity of the underlying structure
renders FPVAs easier to integrate on a tiny chip. However, these arrays may
suffer from various manufacturing defects such as blockage and leakage in
control and flow channels. Unfortunately, no efficient method is yet known for
testing such a general-purpose architecture. In this paper, we present a novel
formulation using the concept of flow paths and cut-sets, and describe an
ILP-based hierarchical strategy for generating compact test sets that can
detect multiple faults in FPVAs. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of
the proposed method in detecting manufacturing faults with only a small number
of test vectors.Comment: Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), March 201
Transport or Store? Synthesizing Flow-based Microfluidic Biochips using Distributed Channel Storage
Flow-based microfluidic biochips have attracted much atten- tion in the EDA
community due to their miniaturized size and execution efficiency. Previous
research, however, still follows the traditional computing model with a
dedicated storage unit, which actually becomes a bottleneck of the performance
of bio- chips. In this paper, we propose the first architectural synthe- sis
framework considering distributed storage constructed tem- porarily from
transportation channels to cache fluid samples. Since distributed storage can
be accessed more efficiently than a dedicated storage unit and channels can
switch between the roles of transportation and storage easily, biochips with
this dis- tributed computing architecture can achieve a higher execution
efficiency even with fewer resources. Experimental results con- firm that the
execution efficiency of a bioassay can be improved by up to 28% while the
number of valves in the biochip can be reduced effectively.Comment: ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 201